The Failed Experiment of the Digital Album Booklet (theoutline.com) 82
An anonymous reader writes: Before the ubiquity of MP3s and streaming platforms, one of the many small joys of buying a new album on CD was slipping the booklet out of the jewel case and reading the liner notes, credits, and lyrics while the music played for the first time. These days, the biographical information, album production notes, promotional photos, and printed lyrics that fans once relied on physical literature for have found homes in other areas online. Artist websites, social media accounts, and sites like Genius and WhoSampled offer a patchwork of album information, like credits and clues to what happened behind the scenes. But those details rarely exist in one place, and production and songwriting credits seem less and less important. Meanwhile, the form that was intended to replace the traditional booklet, the digital booklet, remains a rarity when it comes to new releases. The idea of digital album booklets may appeal to only the nerdiest of music fans, for whom having everything in one place is a ritualistic way to listen to music and for whom album credits are crucial. But in an age where branding is often as important as skill, the lack of digital booklets feels like a wasted opportunity for artists wanting to communicate directly to fans without a social network as a middleman.
Re:MP3s? (Score:4, Informative)
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Move with the times FLAC is SOOOOOO May 11th.
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Booklet? Fine. (Score:1)
But I would be happier if I could just view decent sized, high resolution album covers. iTunes & Spotify at least, offer only thumbnails in their canned "experience".
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This. If a digital booklet had a high-res cover, I'm in. Every time I buy a new CD, I rip it (the physical disc is my backup). And then I scour the Internet trying to find something better than a blurry 400x400 image scanned from paper with halftone artifacts and edge fade all over the place. Sometimes I get lucky and find a high-res digital version from the label, but usually not. Scanning it myself doesn't actually improve the situation, due to the halftoning problem and being lazy.
And it's not like
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I vaguely recall the solution to scaling down without halftone artifacts was to resize down in multiple intermediate steps, I'd be interested to know if there are other solutions.
like:
http://s30.photobucket.com/use... [photobucket.com]
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My trick is to blur the image slightly before resizing, which is probably the same effect. It does get rid of most of the patterning, but it's nowhere near as sharp as native digital artwork.
Lost information (Score:5, Insightful)
Agree completely. Not everyone cared, but for your favorite albums or favorite band or even an unusual track you might want to know something more about -- the CD booklet, preceded by the LP jacket (sometimes with accompanying booklet) was often really informative. (Oh, and those tiny print things on cassettes too... I don't miss those.)
Like DVD extras that gave fans insight beyond the movie, "liner notes" are going the way of the Dodo. I have a friend who has been trying to write on recently released music, and the basic info you'd often get in liner notes is often hard to come by, if they exist at all.
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is usually already somewhere on the internet and only a web search away.
That friend they mentioned was trying to be the one to put that info on the Internet. It has to start somewhere - things don't just magically appear online.
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All that information is still there. All the streaming services that I use have more info on the current track being played, and it is way more comprehensive than the liner notes ever were. Sure, I'll miss the occasional novelty like when Cheech and Chong included a giant rolling paper in the LP, but honestly the internet is far more informative.
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Functioning zipper was my favorite album novelty.
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Rolling Stones :) I never actually saw the working zipper version - I'm too young and it was just a picture later on.
Re: Lost information (Score:1)
My dad had the vinyl, I don't know if he still does.
There was a CD where it wasn't a functioning zipper, but it was a folding flap of cardstock (or maybe I'm inventing that as a false memory).
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The big problem with the zipper was it would gouge into the album next to it on your shelf.
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Forget the CD booklets (Score:5, Interesting)
I want the full-size posters that used to come folded up in many LPs.
When I was in high school, half the wall space in by bedroom was covered with those things.
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You can still buy posters. Do we pay problem solvers a commission around here?
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It's not the same. Those posters are rolled up, not folded into 12"x!2" squares.
hipgnosis (Score:2)
One word: hipgnosis.
Millenials are mourning the loss of the CD booklet?
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Millennials don't mourn shit.
It's the previous gen which do.
(I do but to a lesser extent)
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Millennials will become the "previous gen" soon enough.
A lot of millennials have children now, and the first of GenZ or whatever you call it are coming of age.
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I guess it's just the latest progression of nostalgia to experience recording formats that had inherent limitations. Perhaps it's some way of suffering for one's art? I've lived through albums, cassettes, cds and now am thrilled that I'm quite literally living in the future. I recall saving up allowance/job money to be able to spend $20 on a CD, then finding out only two tracks were worth it. Nowadays we spend $15/month to feed the music desires of my whole family, and I can download whatever I want to list
If only there was some new equivalent ... (Score:2)
There was a widely available format for exchanging information that didn't require a login or membership. This format would require some sort of system for making sure the names didn't get mixed up, and you might need some means of searching it, too. But a band could use this format for promotion of their work, links to concert reviews, additional information about the inspirations for the tracks on their albums, links to interviews they gave and all that stuff. Rather than being just boring text and some p
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A digital version for would be best like PDF or basic images, or even make use of the ID3/ID3v2/etc tags to actually contain that information. Hell, Mp3HD used the id3v2 tag to store t
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You could have always lost the booklet, or had it destroyed somehow. There's no guarantee a paper booklet would survive.
The bottom line is that the artists are likely getting better bang for the buck on social networks and the places like Wikipedia, Genius and so on are doing the other stuff for pretty much free. Even slapping together a PDF then distributing it takes time.
There's a similar parallel to special features on DVDs and BluRays. When the formats were introduced, you'd have some "making of" featur
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Personally that's why I still prefer to get CDs (
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Oh wait, that already exists ... it's called a website.
Is website on the twitter? Or can I find it on my facebook?
dont care (Score:1)
music used to be something somewhat special, today its all the same polished to death generic flat loud noise no matter the genera or band, why would I care to see pictures of people sitting in front of a computer fixing the "dont give a shit" music that took a half a day to record
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once i am done wiping my ass I will
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I don't know what planet you are living on, but music is more diverse and accessible than it has ever been. In the 80s you basically had two choices for recorded music - hang out at the record store with a few thousand titles hand-selected by the record store's buyer, or hang out at the independent record store with a few hundred titles hand-selected by the owner. That was it. Now you can select from millions of signed and unsigned artists from all over the world, and the cost of recording has come down so
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It's really the app store effect. Those two stores from the 80's were both curated (whether by a local expert or the big labels, depending on which you choose). Now, there's loads and loads of garbage mixed in. Finding the good stuff is much harder among the noise than ever before. Yes, there's more good out there, but if you have to find it yourself it's a lot of work.
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I think you just have to adapt. Looking through music at a curated record store was incredibly hard (and expensive!). If you were really lucky, you'd run into an employee who had the same tastes that you did (or at least understood your taste) and you were down $60 and a couple of weeks of repeat listening. Even if you hated the album on first play, you spend good money on it and damnit, you'd listen a couple of times. Sometimes, that record that you initially hated became a lifelong favorite.
Now you do the
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so you admit, music now is a disposable item worth nothing
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"Worth" is a funny word. If you mean monetary worth, then there isn't really much inherent value in music - at least not recorded or written music - thus the perceived need for copyright. If you mean worth as in, things I value (e.g. friends, family, hobbies, free time, etc.), then I'd say it is very valuable. I mean, look at all the people commenting here, at all the traditional media and websites devoted to music, at the hoards that attend concerts. I spend a very large amount of time listening to and dis
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I mean, look at all the people commenting here
you mean 58% less people here commenting about music than a rather dry healthcare hack?
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Yeah, I'm not claiming it's the most valuable thing to all of humanity.
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accessible yes, diverse no ... less you'r one of these people that the same sound in a different language is something unique, and being able to record is not the same as being chosen to be recorded
maybe that's the real issue, anyone regardless of talent can record super high quality poorly mixed over polished slock and the market is flooded with noise
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Again, you are not even looking. It sounds like you want music that sounds like its from another period - which lucky for you people are still making. What is it exactly you are looking for that you can't find?
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music used to be something somewhat special, today its all the same polished to death generic flat loud noise no matter the genera or band, why would I care to see pictures of people sitting in front of a computer fixing the "dont give a shit" music that took a half a day to record
There are many talented musicians out there making great music.You just need to take time to find them.
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refer to the title of the op
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You need to get out more.
No Lyrics Either (Score:2)
I can't believe it's 2017 and we have widespread adoption of digitally-distributed music but lyrics don't already come embedded, with time-codes.
You'd think with all the plastic they're saving they could afford somebody to key in some time codes.
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Hear! Hear!
There's no excuse for digital music not including lyrics, artwork, and whatever other information the artist thinks is interesting. That would be one advantage to buying digital music in the first place instead of buying CDs and ripping them (which many prefer to do).
I suspect part of the problem is the container formats not supporting synchronized lyrics and such. With MP3, as I understand it, the tagging was an afterthought and is a bit of a hack. It works well enough for tags, but has some
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Well, MP3 is not a container format. A MP3 file is simply a stream o
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There's no excuse for digital music not including lyrics
In case you're interested, at least for lyrics, the actual reason is licensing.
Look at a piece of sheet music and you'll notice that the writers of the music and the lyrics are credited separately. Both get a check when you buy a music recording, both of them get a royalty fee. But if you want to *read* the lyrics, then that's a separate check to the lyricist, just as if you were buying a piece of sheet music. It's a relic of the days when sheet music was much more popular (dating back to when more people e
There is only one time an experiment fails. (Score:1)
That time is when you learn nothing from it.
If nothing else, we should have learned that the sacred album is as obsolete as the IBM 360.
U O (Score:2)
Well, ... actually all of it, on iTunes: I have most of the time a digital booklet.
at those times a CD costed the equivalent of our days 30$
Now they cost less than 10$
And as I buy most of my music, hm
What was this article about again?
"Justified" the high price of CDs (Score:3)
These booklets do satisfy music nerds. But for the most part, I think they were included as a way to try to justify the high price of CDs. After all, you were getting a lot more than just audio for 10 songs! Now that music has been decoupled from the CD medium, and people buy music a-la-carte, the motivation for spending the time and money to create the booklets (or some digital equivalent) is no longer there.
They were done poorly (Score:2)
According to Steve Jones, a distinguished professor of communications at University of Illinois at Chicago, the absence of digital booklets can be attributed to two things. First, given all of the different platforms on which people consume digital music, juggling the different template standards for each can be cumbersome. Second, people aren’t looking at digital booklets because we aren’t listening to albums like we used to. “You don’t bring it home in a container and listen to it and look at the sleeve, read the liner notes, et cetera,” said Jones. “You buy your music or stream it instantaneously, usually while you’re doing something else. The space in which one would have looked at the visuals has gone by the wayside.”
I think these are good points, but there are a couple of other things we can point to. For one, the any creative effort or marketing money that would have gone into making booklets has most likely moved to crafting a social networking presence. Social networking is probably a more obvious method for connecting with fans and sharing information.
However, I would guess that part of the problem is that early attempts at digital booklets were so poorly executed that it has poisoned the well. I remember a ti
Words to the song (Score:2)
I used to love the liner notes. How else could I prove to my meathead friends that it wasn't Reverend Bluejeans...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Wasted paper (Score:1)
I want a whole digital album standard (Score:2)
I've posted this before, on Slashdot, but I can't find it now. I very much want to see a standard digital album format. Something simple and open, like a zip file with a standard folder structure and files easy to find within it.
I want high-resolution images of the album art, the original liner notes in both EPUB and PDF format, lyrics (ideally with optional time marks so that the lyrics can be displayed properly as the song plays) and room for extras. Like, I once saw a GIF of the cover [genius.com] of Wish You Were
PDF (Score:2)